How to Find Dalai Lama Meaning in a Minivan World

December 10, 2007

I love my life – I really do. I have two little loony toon boys – Joey and Ben who are eleven and nine – and who keep me going at a hectic pace. I have a Type A investment banker husband who travels regularly, but likes to keep a hand in everything that goes on at home. I work part-time from home as a lawyer/writer; volunteer at school and the community center; and try to get the dogs walked everyday. But I will admit that sometimes I feel that I am mostly a minivan driving mom traveling the same concentric circle everyday in a path of children, errands, and what-not and wondering, like the rat on a spinning wheel, “Is this all there is?”

Recently I determined that I what I needed to achieve was a state of Zen like peace, a Dalai Lama level of happiness and contentment. That was the thought anyway which led me to yoga and a certain organic grocery store that I will call “Holy Foods.” Exercise and the grocery store - where else is there to start?

After a lifetime of Jane Fonda aerobics, step aerobics, spinning, and marathon training, yoga is like nirvana. No more sweaty rooms jammed with bulky bikes or benches or oversized balls. No more frantic step changes or blaring music or perky little gymnasts leading the conga line over a thin step. No more endless clocking of miles or aching butts from the cycle. Yoga is all soft lights, loose clothing, thin mats and chanting music. A core part of the program is sitting cross-legged while breathing and lying prone in the dark with your eyes closed in a period of “relaxation.”

But then a certain amount of contortion is also required. Body parts face one position while corresponding limbs must go in the opposite direction. Joints I was unaware I had must be bent and stretched. Noses must touch knees while eyes must gaze at the ceiling. Feet must face the back wall while waists twist and face the mirror. Instead of Dalai Lama peace this began to feel like a scene from the Exorcist. I appreciated the breathing and relaxation and all the Indian inspired music, but I left limping and sore like I had been mangled in a car accident and the first tingles of whiplash were setting in.

Next stop in my newly inspired life – “Holy Foods.” This organic grocery chain caters to our inner Uma Thurman. Stacked in farmer’s market baskets, the vegetables beckon with exotic names -- bok choi, white eggplant, broccolini -- though they admittedly lack the shiny luster of the local grocery store produce. Along the aisles, recycled cardboard boxes of whole-wheat pastas tout the product’s freedom from genetic engineering and animal testing. Customers lean to thin women in yoga clothes and Birkenstock wearing mothers with babies wrapped in slings around slim hips. The size of the grocery cart suggests, “Less is more.” I deduce that stacking a week’s worth of family groceries in a staggering mound as I strain to push the cart to the checkout was a bad idea. Zen like mothers must shop every day apparently.

A juice bar beckons to me as I round the produce area. This is confusing. Just when I had finally mastered the art of ordering a coffee in Starbucks, another drink market arises with so many different choices of unknown ingredients that I stand like a tourist in a third world country wondering how to speak the native tongue. Yes, there are smoothies with fruit, but they can also contain protein powders, wheat germ, wheat grass, saw grass, and yesterday’s grass clippings. I’m sticking with the strawberry lemonade. But that apparently requires the squeezing of fresh lemons, the dicing of whole strawberries, the blending of ice and then the final master juicing. Apparently Zen like peace requires a life not bound by time or carpool schedules. What is lovely about the robust organic community one finds at “Holy Foods” is that no one is in a hurry. What is equally troubling about this robust community (particularly its employees) is that, well, no one is in a hurry.

Having tried to achieve a Dalai Lama level of inner happiness, I am instead torn limb from limb by yoga, have overpaid for a week’s worth of organic produce, am saddled with beans and lentils that will require days worth of soaking before anything edible appears, and I am late for carpool.

Maybe I should try a pilgrimage to Nepal. But instead of seeking out the counsel of His Eminence, I am going to find the cook – who is surely an old woman squatting over an open fire trying to make dinner with a pile of mung beans and bok choi – and I’m going to ask her the secret to a happy life.